Nagorno-Karabakh’s (Artsakh) military takes proportionate action in its frontline positions to hit back Azerbaijani armed troops, according to a former ombudsperson of Armenia.

At a news conference on Saturday, Larisa Alaverdyan, now an expert in Artsakh affairs and the president of the human rights NGO Against Legal Arbitrariness, described the recent hostilities as a pre-arranged provocation involving also elements of information warfare.

“The [military] actions by Azerbaijan, and the rapidly released statements are nothing but a provocation and a plotted scenario. That presents a mixture of what we know today as information warfare, and a real war,” she noted.

“The Artsakh Republic acts proportionately by and large. What surprised me was the hastily released statement by an organization calling upon the Artsakh authorities to punish the guilty. What I would like NGOs to do is to rely purely on facts, following the statement by the US Department of State; there are quite a lot of unknown things as it is,” Alaverdyan said.

She also called for proper government efforts towards adequately reacting to developments. “First, our authorities should act in a way as they would under conditions of war. But they should not stir up panic in the society. Secondly, Armenia must more actively collaborate with the co-chairs of [OSCE] Minsk Group; they may raise proposals with a key thesis to impose peace upon Azerbaijan,” he added.

Describing the Minsk Group as the highest level mission ever dealing with conflict settlement, Alaverdayn highlighted the unprecedented consensus among its co-chairing countries (US, France and Russia).

“I am sure there is a tremendous amount of unfinished work here,” she said, noting that the July 4 commando raid coincided with the US Independence Day.

The expert also stressed the importance of proper government and civil society efforts towards bringing the issue to the international agenda. “Unless the civil society understands that it is their problem, and they can resolve quite a lot of things, we will not attain significant results,” she added.